Ender's War by Orson Scott Card

Garden City, N.Y. : Nelson Doubleday, 1986. Book club edition. Two volumes in one. Including Ender's game and Speaker for the dead. Hardcover. 634 pages ; 22 cm. An excellent copy with solid binding, clean and unmarked pages.

ENDER'S WARBY ORSON SCOTT CARD

Twice the buggers - as we call them -invaded our solar system and tried to annihilate us. We defeated them in the last war by a fluke, but we won't trust to luck again. When they return — and they will return, even if decades go by and the horror fades into myth — we must be ready...

ENDER'S GAME (An expansion of the novelette of the same name). He was the third of his parents' children to be monitored. Peter, his older brother, had been too uncontrollably violent; Valentine, his sister, seemed incapable of violence altogether. So they pinned their hopes on Andrew Wiggin -nicknamed Ender because of Valentine's childish mispronunciation of his name - and took him to Battle School to begin his military education. He was six years old.

Only Earth's best made it to Battle School, where student armies fought mock wars in zero gravity... "games" intended to develop the tactics and strategies human soldiers would need against the alien enemy. The training was tough, but for Ender they made it tougher still - changing the rules of the game without warning, forcing him to stand alone without friends to rely on, pushing his natural abilities to the limit. For, ultimately, if Ender Wiggin proved himself less than brilliant, there was no hope left for the human race.

SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. Because of their vague resemblance to certain creatures of old Earth, the people of the Lusitania colony called them "piggies." They were the first intelligent life we had encountered in the 3,000 years since the bugger wars, and the Starways Congress was determined not to contaminate their culture. Therefore the colony was restricted to a fenced-in area, and while the resident xenologists were permitted contact, they were forbidden by law to reveal any information about human society.

But, of course, the insulation couldn't work. The piggies had their own ideas about contact with mankind ... and their own secrets to keep. It was only after they murdered Pipo, the human who had first befriended them, that a Speaker for the Dead - Ender Wiggin himself - came to find the real meaning of Pipo's life and death, and the astounding truth about the piggies was revealed.